Devlog #24 Changes to Training

Hi again, I'm back with the newly attempted 'regular updates'. First, a quick note on release scheduling: I lost some progress due to a power outage and subsequent save file problems... I was rendering the final looping animation when a storm blew through town and knocked the computer offline (this should not have been a problem). When I got back, the file I was rendering from was a whole 1 byte big... seems that the hard drive ran out of space, but Maya attempted to save the file anyway, overwriting the original file with garbage. I'm not entirely sure if this scene can be salvaged... about half of it finished rendering, so I may just do a sort of janky 'back and forth' loop instead of the intended smooth one and call it good. Either way, I still need to do a lot of image placement and playtesting, so I think we're still about 2 weeks away. (I say that a lot... it's always 2 weeks...)

But now to training~! As many players have noticed, Liam seems to be pretty much omnipotent from day 1. He has no limits to his strength, even if he only gets 1 or 2 stat points at a time... play for thousands of days, and he'll have thousands of stats. This is great fun and all, but it undermines the eventual play loop by encouraging players to sit at home and go through repetitive training dialogue until whatever arbitrary stat goal they made for themselves has been reached. This next release will add lore-based reasons for Liam's accelerated growth, as well as a progressive limitation on early game progress (to encourage rebirth). There's a new counter for Liam that I call his 'plateau counter'. It starts at 10 (+title modifiers) and counts down once for every training session. Once that reaches zero, Liam will no longer train at peak efficiency (his body has reached its natural limitations). If you continue to train after that point, each session will provide a gradually diminishing return until you are notified that you need to rest before Liam can train again.

"But wait!", you say, "I loved having endless stat growth and exploding things with unimaginable damage numbers!". I've also increased the number of training options and given a boost to the number of points some activities are worth (training with Dad on days 1-3 is now mandatory and gives a large stat boost to help new players get some titles in their first life, and old players can have some fun impressing Horace, so it's a win-win). Also, not every activity that boosts a stat is considered 'training' and counts towards your plateau counter (the intelligence stat is currently unchanged by this system, and anything considered 'play' is not counted as 'training'). This will make more sense as you go through the in-game explanations.

This is an experimental change and will probably be tweaked over time, but I'm hopeful that it will feel natural for returning players.

Cheers!